Great article. There are two things I gleaned from it:
1. Music is now a commodity and/or less valuable than it used to be. The article largely blames technology for this and I agree to a certain extent. The amount of music you can fit in an mp3 player is more than some people will ever hear live, in their lifetime. The Internet, through ease of distribution, has effectively had a 'no filter' effect upon the populous. With no filter to weed out all the garbage and too much garbage, it's de-valued music to the point that it's become like garbage: thow away technology.
2. The influence of technology on music as a craft has made the artform stagnant with unoriginality. There's too much imitation and not enough innovation. But then again, there are probably innovators out there. And innovation in music doesn't happen overnight. There are exceptions (Jaco, Hendrix, etc.). And it does seem like the language of music is changing due to technology. But I disagree that it's being dumbed down to a certain degree. It does seem more dumb though; if you look at folks who compose on laptops with samples. They don't learn how or why a bass line sounds good. Everyone shifts away from being a composer to being a producer. At best, the language of music is changing, evolving. Do I think it's for the better? No. But it's hard to get outside of this box since I'm from the old school. I'm probably going to be a rare breed in that I want to learn and use critical thinking skills. I'd love to sit down and learn how to write horn section parts or learn how to write for string sections. I don't want to just find samples and then pitch them up or down and add effects. But its certainly tempting. Getting off topic, but the Internet is moving us closer to collectivism and further from musical individualism.
Here's an interesting article by Henry Rollins on pirating. Not exactly on topic, but it's a good read.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsoun ... _coppi.php
